Why am I making a blog?

A few weeks into my second co-op, I almost released a bug into production that would have cost the scientific community hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s when I realized that if I don’t document what I learn, I’ll repeat my mistakes. So, this blog will mostly be about software engineering: the problems I encounter while building software, and the things I learn along the way. But, for my first post, I’ll tell you about my motivations and what’s going to make this blog different.

Motivation

Creative outlet

First, I just love to write. Poetry, short stories, even longer works. In my day job I don’t get much time to write (unless you count writing code) so this is a great way for me to combine two of my interests: software engineering and writing.

Sharing my learning

I think that everything I do, from writing poems to designing infrastructure for secure video uploads, is an opportunity to learn. But I also know that I’m prone to forgetting the things that I learn (how many times have I had to re-learn to fix the same bugs over and over?).

Writing here lets me document my own learning and revisit it later on, and hopefully share that learning with others — if I can help others to properly route deep links to a mobile app, why not share it? I’ve been a tutor, teaching assistant, or just the friend who helps with homework throughout high school and college. In a way, this blog is just an extension of that, but without the office hours.

Why this blog

So with all of that said, why would you read this blog? You could pretty easily find a blog written by an engineer with more experience than me. I just graduated college and started my first job a few months ago, so I’m still very early in my career.

But that also means everything is still new to me. I’ll be writing about problems as I encounter them, and sharing both the successes and the failures along the way. It’s easy to make a simple React demo. It’s much harder to talk about the time I leaked customer private keys in URLs. You’ll get to hear about my mistakes, how I’m growing as an engineer, and an honest take on what it’s like being a new software engineer in today’s landscape.

What to expect

So what will I actually be writing about?

On the technical side, I’ll be talking about mobile apps (I am a mobile engineer, after all), web apps, AI (naturally I have to talk about the hottest thing in tech right now), and the problems I’ve solved, whether at work, through side projects, or just interesting technical problems I’ve run into. I also plan to write about being a recent graduate working full-time while the industry is undergoing massive change because of AI and agentic software engineering.

But I’m also a person with hobbies and interests outside of coding, so I’ll be talking about a little bit of that too. Maybe one day I’ll post some of my creative writings, but also just the goings on in my life, the books I’m reading, traveling I get up to, and things like that. I like to think that makes this a bit more interesting than another React Native demo.

Until next time…

I think that’s just about a wrap on my first blog post. If you’re interested in mobile engineering, learning in public, or the occasional bit of creative writing, I hope you’ll follow along. There’s a lot I don’t know yet, but that’s kind of the whole point.

P.S.

In case you were wondering, we caught the bug on a very obscure unit test, so it never made it into production.